Texas Rangers GM Jon Daniels: Keeping Jurickson Profar up a 'pretty simple' decision; no mandate on his playing time

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Published: 25 June 2013 12:38 AM

Updated: 25 June 2013 12:38 AM

Texas Rangers general manager Jon Daniels joined Ben & Skin on KRLD-FM to talk about the Rangers season so far. Here are some highlights:

On keeping Jurickson Profar and sending Leury Garcia down:

Pretty simple, easy decision, really. I think a lot was made out of not much. It really comes down to what’s our best 25? Who are our best players? Two or three years ago, even last year, we had a relatively set lineup one through nine if everyone’s healthy and everyone’s productive. In 2011, Mike Napoli had 30 bombs in the eight hole. If you have that kind of situation going on, then you don’t really play around with things, you don’t really mix other guys in so much and you’ve got a set deal. We don’t have that right now. The biggest this is we’ve been a little banged up. We’ve got some other guys performing a little below where they usually are and where hopefully they’ll get back to. And it just makes sense. Let’s get our best 12 guys up here, give Wash as many options to mix and match, keep guys fresh or get them back to being fresh while they’re banged up and allow him to play the hot hand.

On why Ron Washington was saying they didn’t have a place to play Profar:

Wash and I talk all the time and more often than not, we end up agreeing. Sometimes we don’t. You’ve got to make a call one way or another. This is a situation where Wash said to me, “When [Profar] first came up, I thought he would go back when Ian came. But he’s earned a spot on the team, he’s earned his credibility with the other players, he’s earned it with me and the staff and he’s earned some playing time.” And it’s a function of everything. Jurickson’s played fairly well. He hasn’t lit the world on fire, but he’s played fairly well. He’s a smart player so you can trust him and put him in the game and he’s going to make good decisions. But again, the other thing I touched on is when you look at our club, we haven’t been playing great, we have a number of guys in slumps, and we’re a little bit banged up. So why would you not pick you 12 best players and give yourself a chance? I just think that’s kind of a basic thing, and to Wash’s credit, he kind of made an adjustment and agreed. … He’s not guaranteed to be in there every single day. In fact, I don’t think it benefits him to be in there every single day at this point in his career. If there’s nine guys more deserving of playing, then those are the guys that will play. There’s no mandate or anything like that.

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